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

by Robert Hofler

  Over Christmas 1979, Dominick visited Lenny and their children Dominique and Alex in his ex-wife’s new home. It was a single-story house that made it easier for her to get around in a wheelchair, and Dominick liked that Dominique lived in a little cottage on the property. That Christmas, Griffin remained in New York City, where he performed in Wallace Shawn’s new play, Marie and Bruce. For Dominick, the visit’s best moment came when the four of them gathered around the TV set to watch his daughter’s guest appearance on the TV show Family. Her acting career had taken off, and she had recently signed an exclusive contract with the producer Leonard Goldberg. Dominique and Griffin had inherited their mother’s delicate Latin looks; Alex appeared more the strong Irishman, and in the Dunne family most closely resembled his uncle John.

  Although stricken with multiple sclerosis, Lenny remained gracious and caring, and she never lost her sharp sense of humor. She and Dominick laughed a lot together, more than when they were married, and never more so than when Lenny showed him a newspaper interview with wealthy women who shared their secrets for conserving energy during the ongoing oil shortage. According to Betsy Bloomingdale, she asked her servants not to turn on the self-cleaning oven until after seven in the morning.

  Lenny’s humor and self-awareness, despite her money, always prevented her from turning into another Betsy Bloomingdale. But seeing her in a wheelchair, prematurely aged and felled by multiple sclerosis, Dominick felt wracked with guilt: “She loved me and believed in me, and I let her down.”

  Even though he said he wanted to avoid the holidays in Los Angeles, Dominick remained a social animal. He could not help but make the rounds. Together with Tony Kiser and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Kiki, he went to a New Year’s Eve party at the old Dolores Del Rio mansion. He also made a quick trip back up to Santa Barbara, not to see Linda but to put in an appearance at Wendy Stark’s wedding to a “penniless fellow” named Doug Gorsuch. He loved Wendy, but it amused Dominick that her father, Ray, had flown in from Vail on his jet and kept the taxi waiting during the ceremony so he could return as soon as possible to Colorado. Fran Stark did not make the trip because she was having fifty-five to dinner that night and did not like to fly in small jets, even ones owned by her husband. She had tried to persuade her daughter to have the ceremony in Las Vegas instead, so she could have flown commercial and still been back to Vail in time for her party. But Wendy wanted the wedding in Santa Barbara, so no mom. Dominick, as usual, made the mistake of telling Jack Martin about Ray Stark and the taxi, and the Hollywood Reporter columnist called for verification. Wendy was not pleased.

  Dominick dreaded the impending sale of his furniture. And once again, Arnold Stiefel played savior, delivering more last-minute good news. “Have you sublet your apartment yet?” he wanted to know. At a party the night before, the agent met Madeline Kahn, who was in town to make another Mel Brooks movie. The actress needed a place to live for two months, maybe three. She would pay what Sandy Lieberson had been paying, $2,000 a month.

  Ecstatic, Dominick showed her the apartment himself, and Kahn loved it. She had her concerns, though. She wanted the rugs cleaned, the TV in the bedroom fixed, and the Z channel hooked up. But not to worry. She would pay for everything, and did he mind if she paid him three months in advance?

  Back in Oregon, Joyce and Nick Osika nailed a big sign over the door of his cabin. “Welcome Home Dominick!” It was good to be among real people again in Camp Sherman, even if Joyce had to make a rather frantic run to his cabin to tell him Madeline Kahn did not know how to drain the bathtub. There was no phone in Dominick’s cabin. He apologized to Kahn, telling her he forgot to have it fixed, and gave the name and number of a good plumber.

  A few days later, Joyce made a second, more frantic run to his cabin. There had been a phone call from his brother John, who said to call him back as soon as possible. Since Joyce told him it was urgent, Dominick worried: maybe Aunt Harriet had died. He thought of the money she had recently sent him for his birthday and how she had been the one who took him to Hollywood to lunch at the Brown Derby when he was a boy. As kids, Dominick and his siblings adored their spinster aunt but used to gossip quietly about her leaving the convent, something nuns just did not do in the 1920s. What sin had she committed to break her vow to God?

  But Aunt Harried had not passed away. It was his youngest brother, Stephen. He committed suicide. Stephen’s wife, Laure, called John at four that morning to tell him the unthinkable. When he heard the news, Dominick more than cried. He screamed. His brother would later write about that harrowing phone call in his memoir Harp. “When I told him what had happened, there was a cry of such bleakness that I can remember it still. He pulled himself together and said he had been contemplating suicide himself, perhaps even at the exact same moment as Stephen,” John wrote.

  Dominick did not have the money to attend the funeral. After being offered no fewer than two roundtrip airplane tickets in recent weeks, Dominick now had to beg his brother for one, even though he already owed him a $10,000 debt. The request did not go as expected. John explained how he was “all tapped out,” having lent Stephen $35,000 for a design business he wanted to start. John added that it was not absolutely necessary for Dominick to be at the funeral. Because of their age difference, Dominick and Stephen were never close, in John’s opinion. The remark incensed Dominick. Who does not go to his brother’s funeral?

  “I just would have stayed on and on,” Dominick said of his life in Oregon. “But I had to go back for the funeral. Suicide is so utterly heartbreaking. I thought, I will never commit suicide. It had been on my mind for the last two years.”

  After talking to John, Dominick returned to his cabin. He looked at the typewriter and what he had written the night before. There, wrapped around the roller, was a suicide note. In a way, Stephen’s suicide had prevented him from taking his own, even if it did make Dominick feel “upstaged,” he wrote in his journal.

  Dominick borrowed the money from Aunt Harriet to fly to the funeral in Connecticut. Everyone in the Dunne family stayed at the Holiday Inn in New Canaan, everyone but Big Time and Frail, who chose a much more upscale hotel. The whiskey flowed as the family held an old-fashioned Irish wake, and John thought it amusing when he asked their sister Virginia “which breast had been removed.” She had recently undergone a mastectomy and would die a year later from the cancer.

  Dominick’s friends said he “never” or “only rarely” mentioned his two sisters, Harriet and Virginia, except to say that one of them married an “awful guy” and they both died of breast cancer. The intense relationships were with his brothers, especially John. During the wake in New Canaan, Dominick learned how Stephen took his life: he locked himself in his car, turned on the ignition, and then wrapped a rosary around his hands. His three children knew something was wrong even before their mother did. The exhaust fumes from the garage filled their bedroom and made the kids sick. It was their cries that woke Laure Dunne.

  Very strict Roman Catholics believe suicide to be the one unforgivable mortal sin, and Dominick worried that his brother might not be given a Mass or buried in a Church-consecrated cemetery. It turned out otherwise, and he thanked the priest for being so considerate of the Dunne family.

  Bad weather plagued Dominick’s return to Oregon, and two flights turned into three, as well as an overnight stay in Portland, where he found himself screaming profanities at God after fog forced him to rent a car to drive the final two hundred miles back to Camp Sherman. In his cabin, he found a letter from his renter. Madeline Kahn would not be staying the extra third month as expected, and would be vacating his apartment at the end of February. Please send the deposit. Which he had already spent. He looked at the kitchen knife with the words “Twin View Resort” on it, as if the words would prevent anyone from stealing it. Dominick put down the knife, suicide no longer an option.

  His brother’s death compelled Dominick to look for references to suicide in Play It as It Lays. He reread Joan Didion’s novel, lookin
g for those lines about the “fags” who enjoyed Maria’s company “because she would listen to late night monologues about how suicidal they felt.” Also, he reread Maria’s line about pills being “a queen’s way of doing it.” Despite the novel’s virulent homophobia, Dominick sent John and Joan a note, telling them how much he enjoyed reading her novel again after all these years. He wrote that it was even more “exquisite” than he remembered.

  Friends wrote their condolences, and among those many letters was one from Truman Capote. He did not mention Stephen’s death; maybe he did not know about the suicide. In his letter, Capote told Dominick that he was doing the right thing, going to Oregon to write. But, “that is not where you belong. When you get out of it what you went there to get, you have to come back.”

  Dominick would later say that Capote’s letter “made me cry. I had felt forgotten. He made me feel like I mattered. His letter was the impetus of my return to the fray, with my new career as a writer.”

  In a way, Dominick had no choice but to return to Los Angeles. He could not put off the sale of his furniture. He had to let go of the Spalding Drive apartment. Tony Kiser offered him a place to stay in Santa Monica. Mart Crowley sent him $1,000. He was broke. He was already way overdue on his novel to Simon & Schuster. But he had good friends.

  On his way south on the 101 Highway, Dominick picked up a young, good-looking hitchhiker outside Santa Barbara and realized he had made a mistake as soon as the guy sat down and closed the car door. He gave off a bad vibe. Dominick begged God to protect him. He kept praying, but in Malibu his worst suspicions were realized when the hitchhiker pulled a knife and demanded that Dominick get out of the car. Dominick did as told but grabbed the car keys before he made a quick exit, which led to a chase down the middle of the road. Finally, a man in a truck told him to get in, and they watched as the police apprehended and arrested his attacker. Dominick later wrote that it was only one of three moments in his life when he was almost killed under “murky circumstances.” This was one of those times.

  The sale of Dominick’s belongings lasted three days. Dominique helped with the tagging, and even gave him the rent money for his final month at the Spalding Drive apartment.

  Dominick asked his friends to be shoppers. Those who stopped to look and buy included Mart Crowley, Arnold Stiefel, Caroline Whitman, Wendy Stark, and Jack Martin, who brought the Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed. They all bought something, “paying more than they were worth to help Dominick,” said Stiefel. Stark overpaid for an old fireplace fender, giving her friend an $800 check.

  With money from the sale, Dominick moved to New York City, unencumbered by anything except his clothes, packed into Henry Fonda’s Gucci luggage from Ash Wednesday. Dominick also felt a renewed determination to finish his novel. Or was that novels? New York City was the place to do it, not Oregon or Los Angeles.

  Dominick had a way of living in extraordinarily fine style regardless of his finances. In Manhattan, he lived for a while with an heiress named Gillian Spreckles Fuller Spencer-Churchill Pisercio Campello—or Gillian Fuller, for short. As with so many women Dominick befriended, she was not only rich but elegant. Gillian reminded Dominick of the Tracy Lord character in The Philadelphia Story. When he put out the word he needed a place to stay in New York, she offered him a bedroom, even though her apartment was in the process of being drastically renovated. It helped that she was not often home, working fourteen-hour days at a TV show on ABC called Kids Are People Too, which, according to Dominick, made her less money than she paid her part-time secretary. Better yet, Dominick did not have to make love to her like his lady friend Linda, because Gillian was dating a younger man. It would be a perfect living arrangement, except for the renovation. He told friends the apartment looked like a Cocteau movie, and described to them the black lacquered tables, the Coromandel screens, and paintings by Hockney, Rauschenberg, and Vasarely—everything covered in cellophane tarpaulins and lit from above by a giant skylight in the two-story living room. Dominick called Gillian “Medici-like.”

  Also Medici-like was Tony Kiser, who, “quite by coincidence,” had recently returned to New York City and now lived in Fuller’s apartment building, at 131 East Sixty-Sixth Street.

  Kiser took one look at the extensive renovation and asked his L.A. émigré friend, “How the hell can you write with all these workmen in here all day?” Dominick had no idea, and Kiser offered him an office in the charity foundation that his family operated nearby, at 1 East Fifty-Third Street. Dominick could walk there every day. Medici-like, indeed. Also convenient was the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, near Fuller’s apartment building, and St. Thomas Church, near the Kiser Foundation. Every morning Dominick stopped at one church or the other to pray. Statues of saints festooned both buildings and Dominick believed they kept vigil over him.

  Only a couple of things were missing. For some reason, Noël Coward and W. Somerset Maugham no longer made their separate visits like they did at Spalding Drive and the Twin View Resort. Maybe the stone saints scared them away. Maybe it was St. Thomas or St. Vincent who now advised Dominick to incorporate his Simon & Schuster novel, Joyce Haber’s “The Users,” Part 2, into his own book, A Faller by the Wayside, which he had retitled Portrait of a Failure, and write one big novel. It would tell the story of Mona Berg (Sue Mengers) from the viewpoint of the Hollywood has-been Burnsy Harrison (Dominick Dunne), who meets all of these characters at a party given by Marty Lesky (Ray Stark). Even though Maugham was no longer speaking to him, Dominick borrowed the structure for his Hollywood novel from The Razor’s Edge, wherein Maugham’s character Sophie gives the low-down on all the people attending the opening-chapter party. Burnsy Harrison would be a Sophie-like guide to contemporary Los Angeles.

  Dominick delivered several pages of this new novel to Michael Korda. He thought they were excellent pages. Korda did not, and promptly rejected them. According to the editor, Dominick strayed too far from the original story, and Korda ordered him to get rid of the Burnsy Harrison character completely.

  Dominick rewrote in a mad panic. In his rejection letter, Korda went so far as to suggest that Simon & Schuster would take legal action to recover the advance money if Dominick did not write a novel based on the story in his unproduced teleplay. The threat of the advance money being returned made Dominick put aside any ego about being a good writer. He had wasted so much time in Oregon writing letters instead of the book. In New York, he got the new pages back to Korda in record time, before Labor Day 1980, then spent the holiday fretting in the hot, humid city. To take his mind off Korda, he visited a friend who lived on Sutton Place and, for some reason, had not escaped to the Hamptons or the country for the holiday. Seemingly everyone Dominick knew in Manhattan had a fabulous address out of a Ross Hunter movie about the metropolis. On this particular afternoon, he was not invited to check out the view of the historic Pepsi-Cola sign across the East River in Queens. The lure at Sutton Place was to meet Cal Culver. In 1980 the general public did not know Cal Culver, but among the gay cognoscenti he was famous for being a living replica of Michelangelo’s David, only bleach blond. Under the name Casey Donovan, Culver starred in the most famous gay pornography film ever made, The Boys in the Sand. “Cheap enough?” Dominick said of his invitation to Sutton Place. The owner of the apartment apologized profusely for saying hello and then leaving the two men alone: he had to keep a pity date with one of his rich widow friends recovering from a face lift.

  Cal Culver very much looked forward to meeting the producer of The Users, which, fortuitously, re-aired only the night before. The porn star claimed to have seen it several times, and proved especially astute in his observations about the bugle-beaded gowns that Nolan Miller designed for Jaclyn Smith, Michelle Phillips, and Joan Fontaine. Culver informed Dominick that, despite being thirty-eight years old, he continued to be hired for sex on a regular basis. He did not consider what he did hustling or prostitution. It was sex therapy. Besides, he needed the money for his new investment. Culv
er was in the middle of renovating a guest house he owned in Key West, Florida, where, he hoped, he would one day retire to run a bed and breakfast. Whatever sexual “guilt” Dominick had felt in the past with men evaporated that afternoon on Sutton Place. And for sixty-five dollars, he noted, “I had one of the most extraordinary afternoons of my life.”

  Paying sixty-five dollars for the services of a hustler or a sex therapist did not leave Dominick much money to go to the theater, one of his favorite pastimes. But unlike sex, he got to indulge that leisure for free, always on the invitation of a rich friend. In the summer of 1980, Dominick saw Evita, Children of a Lesser God, and 42nd Street, which he found had been overrated due to the timely opening-night death of its director, Gower Champion.

  The best news arrived right after Labor Day. Dominick met with Michael Korda at his office at Simon & Schuster, and the last batch of rewritten pages—the ones without Burnsy Harrison—won raves from the editor. However, because so much of the novel remained to be written, Korda put his first-time novelist on a strict regimen. They would meet every Friday at the publishing house to go over the new pages. Dominick admitted he needed deadlines, many of them. What Dominick did not realize was that an editor meeting with a novelist on a weekly basis to finish writing his novel is about as typical as a doctor making a house call because somebody has come down with a bad headache. It was the kind of special treatment Dominick thought he deserved and, in the future, the kind he would get from two very important editors.

  Korda gave high praise, and Dominick later told friends, “It was like the father approval I’ve waited my whole life to get.” Korda also told him, “There’s nothing the public enjoys more than the rich and the powerful in a criminal situation.” Dominick heard a “boing” go off in his head. “That’s my life!” he thought.