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

by Robert Hofler

  Wendy Stark recalled, “Nick was down and out and needed money. We were trying to help him, but also give him something to do for the money. His heart wasn’t in it.”

  And it showed. Ray Stark hated Dominick’s treatment. Fortunately, the producer skipped the Mary Benny party and let his wife attend alone.

  The hostess avoided greeting Dominick. She had also invited her hairdresser at the last minute. Mary Benny managed to say hello to him. With nary a hot dog or hamburger in sight at the barbeque, the tables sat fifty each and came loaded with silver, porcelain, and crystal. Dominick saw his good friend Tita Cahn and told her of his plans to go to Oregon for three months to write his novel. The wife of lyricist Sammy Cahn listened thoughtfully and told him it was a great idea. Others listened and then changed the subject to talk about what bartender they should hire for their next party or what to do about their pet dachshund’s bad breath.

  Out of malice, perhaps, Mary Benny sat Dominick next to his new arch-enemy Connie Wald, fresh from asking Lenny to tell him he was no longer invited to her upcoming party in honor of Marguerite Littman. Dominick wanted to ask Connie if she had gotten her money’s worth from the pooch he had sold her years ago. Instead, they kissed and did not say a word to each other the whole night. Jerry Wald’s widow was busy telling people another of her Audrey Hepburn stories—Dominick often called her Connie “My Best Friend Is Audrey Hepburn” Wald—and across the table Billy Wilder’s wife, Audrey, was laughing too hard at a Johnny Carson story that the late-night TV host’s producer, Freddie de Cordova, was telling. (Dominick would remember that kind of over-the-top laughter when O.J. Simpson’s lawyers responded in kind to jokes the accused told them in court.) The only bright spot in the conversation came when someone asked, “Who’s Jerry Zipkin?” Dominick wanted to say that Zipkin was a homosexual bachelor who had done nothing with his life but escort women like Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale to the opera when their husbands preferred staying home to get a good night’s sleep. But he held his tongue. Instead, Dominick told himself he had played this scene too many times, got up from the table, and left Mary Benny’s barbeque.

  Outside, a parking attendant who prided himself in driving nothing but Porches, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes-Benzes let out a loud huff when he brought up Dominick’s dusty old Granada. If Dominick ever had any doubt about leaving Los Angeles and starting a new act in his life, it had been atomized.

  5

  Capote and Suicide

  The second-hardest thing about leaving L.A. would be giving up his Spalding Drive apartment. The hardest would be holding a big sale. The humiliation of having to ask friends to purchase his belongings nearly paralyzed Dominick. But he had no choice. It would pay for his trip. Maybe he would go as far north as Vancouver, where Alex now lived. His younger son had founded his own magazine, Belle Lettres, which made Dominick very proud. He had a journalist in the family. As a boy, Alex used to write monthly newsletters. “They were what today we’d call a blog,” said Freddy Eberstadt. “Alex was the most endearing child.”

  Dominick dreaded the idea of friends tramping through his apartment, haggling about prices, wondering about his ignominious defeat. Just when he was about to tag everything he owned for the sale, Arnold Stiefel once again came to him with a much preferred solution. Twentieth Century Fox recently hired a new president, and coming from London, Sandy Lieberson needed a place to live in Los Angeles. He would pay $2,000 a month for the apartment, which was $1,000 more than Dominick paid in rent to his landlord. Lieberson also agreed to pay the first and last month’s rent, meaning Dominick suddenly had enough money to finance his trip north without selling so much as a Steuben ashtray. Lieberson wanted a furnished apartment.

  With that sublet cash in hand, Dominick took off for the California coast, and when he got to Santa Barbara he phoned a lady friend he had met at an Allan Carr party. Linda was wealthy, nice looking, and she had promised to take Dominick to some of the area’s finer restaurants. She also owned a beautiful home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and the two of them spent a few nights together there before he continued his way up the coast. They were both very lonely, Linda later noted in a letter to him.

  It was a glorious trip north until Dominick arrived at the picturesque ocean-side town of Coos Bay, Oregon. The local bookstore boasted a newsstand so cosmopolitan that it carried Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Dominick remembered his lunch earlier that summer at the Polo Lounge with the magazine’s executive editor. He wondered if Bob Colacello had made good on his promise to mention him in his column. Dominick may have left Hollywood, but he was not immune to wanting some good publicity. He bought a copy of Interview and quickly turned to Colacello’s article, titled “Out in California.” The editor had spent twelve days that August on the West Coast, eating his way through some of the Napa Valley and L.A.’s better restaurants. Dominick saw his own name under the entry marked Friday, August 3. He read with much anticipation what Colacello had written: “Lunch at the Polo Lounge with Dominick Dunne, who produced The Users. Too used to describe.” Dominick kept reading. Later on August 3, Colacello dined at Mortons with two editors from the Los Angeles Times whom Dominick had never heard of. Colacello wrote of them, “Too timely to describe.”

  Dominick staggered out of the bookstore. He could not believe that Colacello, who purported to be his friend and invited him to lunch, would trash him so publicly, so dismissively, in so few words. But what difference did it make? He had left Hollywood. Besides, what the Interview editor wrote was the truth. Nasty, but the truth. It reaffirmed for Dominick how much he needed to leave Los Angeles.

  Dominick was continuing his trip up the Pacific coast when the battery on his Granada died. Years later, when he told the story, it became a flat tire that landed him near Camp Sherman, Oregon. The town did not amount to much—a post office, a bait shop, a general store, a restaurant, two filling stations, and something called Twin View Resort. It was very well named. Each of the eight red cabins offered splendid views of Black Butte on one side and Mount Jefferson on the other. In the beginning, Dominick found it peculiarly charming that the walls of his cabin were knotty pine and the floor linoleum, and the single bed had a plastic covered headboard made of imitation leather and flecked with gold. In the cupboard, he found Texas Ware cereal bowls. Could he be any farther away from Chasen’s and the Bistro Garden? Best of all, he liked the equally basic but picturesque Hungarian couple who owned the place.

  It is doubtful that Joyce and Nick Osika believed Dominick’s story about being poverty-stricken; regardless, they let him bargain the cabin’s monthly rent from $400 to $250, even though that included utilities, towels, and sheets. They liked that he would be staying for more than a month. When he saw them checking out his Gucci luggage, he told the Osikas he had bought it used. Actually, he had not bought it at all. It was Henry Fonda’s Gucci luggage from Ash Wednesday, just as he “owned” Tuesday Weld’s Sony cassette recorder from Play It as It Lays and Tony Curtis’s terry cloth robe from The Users. Elizabeth Taylor gave him the gold chain around his neck. He kept those origins a secret, not wanting anyone to know his Hollywood past. Joyce and Nick could not see inside his luggage, which further stretched his penniless story. He had packed six cashmere sweaters, several tortoiseshell sunglasses, and a few tweed jackets, all of which were not castoffs from a movie set but bought at top dollar on Rodeo Drive and environs.

  A mechanic named Harvey fixed the battery and got his Granada running, and, better yet, he sold him some grass to smoke. Dominick asked about the mushrooms he had seen growing near the cabins; he did not know if they were the killer kind or the “tripping kind.” Harvey said he did not know anything about eating mushrooms except out of a can. The more people he met, the more enchanted Dominick became with the residents of Camp Sherman. Unlike people in Hollywood, they were not fakes. They looked him in the eye, not over his shoulder to see who else just walked into the room. They lived life from “the gut,” he wrote in his journal. />
  Between the grass and the kindly locals, he did struggle with loneliness. Whenever he got depressed, Dominick drove his Granada to the Black Butte Ranch, a first-rate resort, and gawked at the rich Oregonians. And there were other things to do. “I began to feed the birds. Birds?” he said. “I never fed birds before.” He also worried about the deer. Hunting season had begun that autumn, and the constant gun fire reminded Dominick of World War II. Oregon hunters typically carried two guns—one rifle and one pistol, to finish off the animal if the bigger weapon did not do it. Dominick found the hunters barbaric.

  On one of his lonelier days, he wrote to a West Hollywood friend, asking him if he knew of any gay bars or baths in Eugene, Oregon. He might make a trip there. Meanwhile, he wrote. He did not write the Joyce Haber novel, but he did write a lot of letters. Long letters.

  “The letters would be five pages,” Griffin Dunne recalled. “Then ten pages and then twenty pages single-spaced. He was using them like a workshop to find his voice.”

  Dominick found that if he wrote a letter to a friend about the novel he was supposed to be writing for Simon & Schuster he could trick himself into actually writing a scene for the novel.

  His desk in cabin number 5 featured all the usual accoutrements: a typewriter, paper, pencils, and papers clips. Dominick added one elegant touch from his very recent past: a pink vase from a breakfast tray that he pilfered from the Beverly Hills Hotel. At night, Dominick cheered up the single room by lighting a fire and putting on his satin dressing gown and velvet slippers, just like he used to do on Spalding Drive. He had stopped drinking alcohol, but he did smoke a joint. It was then that his twin fantasies, Noël Coward or W. Somerset Maugham, took turns visiting, just like they used to on Spalding Drive. They gave him invaluable advice on how to write his novel. Noël told Dominick to dump Joyce Haber’s “The Users,” Part 2 and write his own novel about Sue Mengers and the Stark family, to be titled A Faller by the Wayside. Somerset gave him the idea for a narrator: The story should be told from the viewpoint of a burned-out Hollywood producer who escapes to Oregon to find himself and, in the process, exposes every ugly Tinseltown secret he knows.

  Dominick could not have loved Noël and Somerset’s ideas more if he thought of them himself, which, of course, he had. He loved it so much that he turned down his Santa Barbara girlfriend’s offer to attend Henry and Claire Herberts’ ball at their Wilton estate in England on October 26, 1979. Linda told him it should not be missed, that Prince Charles might attend. She even offered him a first-class roundtrip airplane ticket to and from London. Dominick enjoyed feeling like a “gigolo,” of being offered something so extravagant, especially from a lady friend. But he had his new priorities, and going to a party nine thousand miles away was not one of them.

  In a letter, Linda called their nights together an “affairette.” The word saddened Dominick, and he wrote back how their time together meant much more to him. He called it “a perfectly lovely love affair.”

  That same autumn a second offer of a free roundtrip airplane ticket arrived at Twin View Resort, this one from his son. Griffin Dunne’s movie Head over Heels was about to open commercially. “The kid’s done it!” Dominick exclaimed. Griffin wanted his father at the movie’s premiere and offered to pay for the trip. “He wrote me a beautiful letter saying he simply could not come to New York, even though it was to celebrate me,” Griffin recalled. “He was on a journey and a path that he could not take himself away from.”

  Nothing could deter him from the novel he was trying to write. When Linda wanted to visit him in Oregon, Dominick made it clear that his cabin was small, only one room, and the toilet did not work very well. It required at least two flushes, sometimes three. He advised her instead to book a room at the nearby Black Butte Ranch. He would make the reservation for her, but could not. He wanted to preserve his anonymity there, because he sometimes used the resort’s Xerox machine. Linda got the hint, never made the trip, and a few months later, she married another man.

  Dominick often spent the early evenings with Joyce and Nick in their cabin watching TV. He had begun to like her better than him. Nick indulged in this odd habit of screaming at the TV screen whenever Dan Rather appeared. He somehow thought the newscaster was responsible for the Iran hostage crisis, and Dominick wondered why Nick did not just watch ABC or NBC instead.

  Joyce quickly emerged as the saner of the two. She sometimes gave Dominick hot dishes she cooked, and he ate elk for the first time in his life. Somehow the topic of Elizabeth Taylor came up one evening—he did not tell her he had produced Ash Wednesday—and Joyce mixed up the order of the actress’s husbands. Dominick’s immediate instinct was to correct her, but did not. He told himself, “Let it go. It doesn’t matter.” When he said goodnight to the Osikas that night, he felt he had made a breakthrough not mentioning that Mike Todd came after Michael Wilding in the trajectory of Liz’s men.

  His old way of life, however, had a way of slapping Dominick in his Gucci pocketbook, even in the wilds of Oregon. He hated paying for the delivery of a package that went to the Spalding Drive apartment since he needed every dollar. He opened the package to find monogrammed slippers purchased that summer. They cost him $600 at a time when he railed against his agent for taking 10 percent of the $30,000 advance from Simon & Schuster.

  Financial concerns hit him even harder when Dominick learned that the studio executive subletting his Beverly Hills apartment had been fired as president of Twentieth Century Fox. Mart Crowley sent him the latest issue of the Hollywood Reporter, which carried the full scoop. Sandy Lieberson resigned, which was a nice way of saying he had been fired, and after only a few weeks on the job. Lieberson had paid two months’ rent with an option for a third, and Dominick was now living on the deposit, which had to be repaid. He considered getting drunk but forced himself to remain on the wagon, and instead pigged out by driving fourteen miles to what Nick and Joyce told him was the most expensive restaurant in all of central Oregon, the Tumalo Emporium near the town of Sisters.

  In most of his missives to friends, and there were many, Dominick made them very aware of his impending fifty-fourth birthday. It worked. Birthday cards filled his mail box on October 29, 1979. Many contained gifts. Linda sent him a Rigaud candle. Dominique sent two Yves Saint Laurent shirts. His brother Stephen sent boots from L.L. Bean. And best of all, Aunt Harriet sent him a check for one hundred dollars. He wrote back, telling her how he had been “humbled” most of his life but was beginning “the last quarter fresh.”

  Griffin also wrote to say that New York magazine recently profiled him for his new movie. It thrilled Dominick. Then he panicked. Would his own son be referred to as John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion’s nephew? Would he, the failure of a father, even be mentioned?

  One thing was for sure. A birthday greeting from John thoroughly depressed him. His brother wrote about going to Sue Mengers’s house for dinner, how charming and delightfully funny she had been, and how he and Joan chatted for the longest time with their new friend Gore Vidal. The blatant name-dropping scalded Dominick’s ego. John knew he hated Mengers, mocked her loser husband, and had once been friends with Vidal. Dominick vented by writing a letter to his therapist, saying how John’s insensitivity reawakened in him these “he-should-have-been-a-girl feelings.” What made it all so devastating was that John’s rise in Hollywood was “concurrent” with his equally precipitous decline.

  Dominick never outgrew hating his father. To rediscover the little boy who never was allowed to grow up, Dominick wrote to both John and his therapist to tell them about his homosexuality. Afraid these confessions might never be sent, like the one he wrote to his children, Dominick drove to the town of Sisters to mail the two letters. He made the trip despite a snowstorm and his not having the money to put snow tires or chains on his Granada. He felt the written confessions were vital to his rebirth and peace of mind.

  In the letter to John, Dominick mentioned recent events like the Advocate Experience, as well as
episodes from their youth, like the time he had sex with Andreas Devendorf in the Buick when the rest of the Dunne family attended their father’s wake. He also mentioned Play It as It Lays. Dominick doubted that Joan would be surprised at the news of his sexual orientation since she had based the BZ character on him.

  Unlike the letter to his brother, Dominick made the one to his therapist sexually graphic, even though the two men had never discussed his homosexuality in their sessions together. He wrote of his childhood encounters with adult men in restrooms. He wrote of sex for hire. He wrote what he liked to do and did not like to do in bed with men. Regardless, Dominick claimed that none of these encounters gave him real pleasure. The one exception was his lovemaking with Andreas Devendorf, which he considered innocent and untarnished by guilt. And he wrote about his attraction to Frederick Combs, with whom he never had sex on a “one-to-one basis, and was grateful.” Dominick called such love “a sickness.”

  Before the year-end holidays, Dominick prepared for his return to Los Angeles, to give up his apartment and auction off his belongings. It depressed him that he had not written the novels, either of them, and the Simon & Schuster one was due the first of the year. And it depressed him that John’s Christmas card made no mention of his coming out. The disclosure meant so much to Dominick. It clearly meant nothing to John.

  Driving south on Highway 1 to Los Angeles, Dominick considered trying to return to his old film career there. Someone might hire him. He recalled how Bette Davis took out an ad in Variety asking for a job, which led to her being cast in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It sounded like a good idea. Maybe it would work for him. He would buy an ad, telling people he was available to produce movies and/or write screenplays. Just then a big bird dumped on his windshield to let him know it was a wretched idea. As much as he identified with Charlotte Vale, Dominick would never be Bette Davis.