“Over the years, so much has been written about that brunch. It has been embroidered and embellished,” said Brenner. Dominick would always refer to it as a Tex-Mex dinner. “I think I served huevos rancheros. It was very casual, just six people, maybe.”
Tina Brown also recalled that early May 1983 get-together, saying, “He told me he was off the next day on a tragic mission—to attend the trial of his twenty-two-year-old daughter’s murderer.” When Dominick told the story, he often said he was “leaving the next day for the trial.” In a Dunne profile, New York magazine retold his version: “The night before he left New York to attend the trial of Dominique’s attacker, Dunne was introduced to Tina Brown at a dinner party. She encouraged him to keep a journal.”
Dominick did not leave New York City that May for the trial in Los Angeles. He left two months later, on July 5, for the pretrial hearings, held later that month. The trial itself began in August.
Dominick remembered Tina Brown as being “this little English wren” the day they met, “not a glamorous woman as she gradually became.” According to him, she advised, “Keep a journal every day and come and see me when it’s over.” He invariably gave her full credit, saying, “Tina Brown literally discovered me. She found inside me something I didn’t know I possessed.”
In future interviews, Dominick never talked about the book he originally intended to write about the trial. In their telling of it, Dominick and Brown always made him the reluctant writer, either not wanting to capitalize on his daughter’s murder or too traumatized to write about the ordeal. She, in turn, was always the supportive editor who saw the light that made him shine, finally, and pushed him to write. For his own good.
Brenner, for her part, recalled telling Dominick to keep a journal during the trial. “He was very upset about it,” she said. “I gave him classic writer’s advice, as a way of dealing with the trauma. Tina said, ‘If you write that, I’d publish it in Vanity Fair.’” At the time of the brunch, Brown had not yet been hired by Condé Nast.
Fortunately for Dominick’s future as a writer, Condé Nast soon finalized its deal with Brown to revamp Vanity Fair and be its editor in chief. Although Dominick often spoke of being reluctant to write about the trial, he never had to be pushed in that endeavor by Brown or anyone else. On June 7, 1983, a full month after the Brenner brunch, he wrote a pitch letter to Brown, sending it not to the Vanity Fair offices but to the Surrey Hotel where she had taken up temporary residence. In the letter, Dominick reintroduced himself, reminding her how they had met at Brenner’s apartment a few weeks before. He went on to reveal how he intended to write a book about the trial but thought she might consider an article on the subject before the book’s publication. He made no mention of their previously talking about such a piece. In the letter, he instead recalled their discussing Henry Kissinger and how articulate and “detailed” she had been in her observations regarding the former secretary of state.
Years later, Tina Brown said, “There are writers who discover you, but the writers you love the most are those whom you discover, and I never loved any of them more than I loved Dominick.”
It is debatable who discovered whom, but one thing is certain: Brown wasted no time contacting Dominick after she read his two-page, single-spaced, typewritten pitch letter. (Dominick often told the story that Brenner phoned him the day after her brunch to set up the lunch with Brown.) They met for lunch at La Goulou in mid-June and she offered him $15,000 for ten thousand words on the John Sweeney trial. She had even bigger plans. Dominick remembered her telling him, “You shouldn’t be wasting your Hollywood stories at dinner parties. You should write them for the magazine. . . . It would take me ten years to train somebody who knows as many people as you know and who can tell stories the way you tell stories.”
Dominick never discussed a book about the Sweeney trial with Freddy Eberstadt. They did, however, talk about the Vanity Fair article, and according to his close friend, Dominick expressed concern that people might find it “creepy” if he wrote about Dominique’s murder and the subsequent trial.
Three weeks after lunch with Tina Brown at La Goulou, Dominick left for Los Angeles, on July 5, even though the trial would not begin for at least a month. In his Vanity Fair “Justice” article, he would write that he spent the plane ride speaking to a stranger seated next to him, “postponing as long as possible facing the feelings of dread within me.” In his private journal, Dominick never mentioned the stranger seated next to him in first class. Instead, he wrote of using the five-hour plane ride to continue his research on the Woodward murder for Mrs. Grenville. That research included reading Igor Cassini’s recently published novel Pay the Price. To Dominick’s discerning eye, it was obvious that Cassini, brother of fashion designer Oleg Cassini, retold many tales based on actual events from his long tenure as the Journal-American’s gossip columnist. In 1955, using the nom de plume Cholly Knickerbocker, Cassini wrote three in-depth columns on the Woodward murder. Then, at the height of the scandal, the articles stopped abruptly. Had Elsie Woodward asked a Hearst executive at Journal-American to end the coverage on her former daughter-in-law and dead son? Dominick used that supposition as a plot point in Mrs. Grenville, having Alice Grenville (the Elsie Woodward character) go over the head of gossip columnist Fydor Cassati (the Igor Cassini character) to ask Millicent Hearst to place a moratorium on any more articles about her daughter-in-law, Ann Grenville.
Many people in New York City soon came to know the subject of Dominick’s second novel. Not everyone looked forward to the book’s publication. “Truman Capote was upset about it,” said Dotson Rader. “Dominick was stealing his idea. Truman wouldn’t have cared if it was an article. But Dominick was writing about the Woodwards from Truman’s point of view. It was part of his book.” Indeed, the narrator of Dominick’s novel is a character named Basil Plant, based on Capote, whose roman à clef about the murder causes Ann Grenville to commit suicide.
In 1983 who expected Capote to finish Answered Prayers? Not Dominick. He had more pressing matters than Capote’s wounded pride. He needed to know where he was going to stay in Los Angeles during the trial. Once again, he relied on the generosity of a wealthy lady friend, in this case, Anne McDermott, the estranged wife of TV producer Tom McDermott, his erstwhile boss at Four Star. She offered Dominick her house in the Holmby Hills free of charge but not without strings: he would have to share the house with Tom and his current girlfriend, the writer Rona Jaffe, author of The Best of Everything and Mazes and Monsters. Dominick knew Anne wanted him to keep an eye on her husband. No surprise: Jaffe took an immediate dislike to Dominick, and the feeling was mutual.
To get around in Los Angeles, Dominick drove Dominique’s electric blue convertible Volkswagen. It was not his style, but at least he did not have to spend money on a rental. In the car’s glove compartment, he found his daughter’s sunglasses, the same pair she had called her Annie Hall glasses, the ones he had bought for her in Florence during her student days there. Putting them in his jacket pocket, he promised to carry the glasses with him as a cherished talisman throughout the trial.
No sooner did Dominick take up residence at the McDermotts’ than he received a phone call from Lenny. She had major news. Vicki Morgan, the mistress of department-store heir Alfred S. Bloomingdale, had been beaten to death with a baseball bat! Morgan’s schizophrenic gay roommate, Marvin Pancoast, confessed to the crime the night of the murder. Dominick immediately thought: there’s another book! He also gasped. He knew the killer. Pancoast briefly worked for Allan Carr as a secretary and ran off with an extensive Rolodex, much to the manager-producer’s distress. Hollywood—it’s such a small town.
And poor Betsy Bloomingdale. Dominick and Lenny talked about what had to be her crippling embarrassment. Betsy had fought like a black belt to prevent the $18,000-a-month mistress from getting any of the money her husband had willed the girl. Now the Bloomingdales’ close friendship with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan would be
resurrected, along with Betsy’s determined campaign to prevent Morgan from winning her $5-million palimony lawsuit. Betsy was no Elsie Woodward. If it meant stoking a scandal, Betsy would do it to keep Alfred’s money. Poor Betsy. Dominick recalled how nice her husband had been when he petitioned him to give Mart Crowley his first credit card.
After he and Lenny finished talking about the latest L.A. scandal, they made plans that night to attend a meeting of Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) in Brentwood. It was bizarre, gossiping about the murder of a stranger and then mourning the murder of one’s own daughter. That evening, at a Presbyterian church, the parents of Dominique Dunne got their first lesson on murder trials. At the POMC meeting, they learned how defense lawyers earn big money and almost always outclass the prosecutors in court. John Sweeney’s defense had done extensive interviews with psychiatrists, and Dominick feared that the district attorney, Steven Barshop, would not be as prepared. Friends told him not to worry. Barshop was tough and had successfully prosecuted the killers of Sarai Ribicoff, niece of Senator Abraham Ribicoff.
In the article “Justice,” Dominick would write that “friends of ours had advised us to leave town until the trial was over.” He never identified those “friends,” but at least two of them were actually very close relatives, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. Years later, John revealed his reason for giving such advice: “Before the first preliminary hearing, I could predict that the counsel for the accused would present the standard defense strategy in cases of this sort: the victim, unable to speak for herself, would be put on trial, and presented, in effect, as a co-conspirator in her own murder.”
Dominick had always intended to attend the trial. How else could he write a book or article about it? The POMC meeting in Brentwood only strengthened that resolve when the father of a murdered child told him it was his duty to be at the trial every day. He said, “It’s the last business of your daughter’s life.”
Everywhere he went in Los Angeles people were talking about the murders of Dominique Dunne and Vicki Morgan. It caused an emotional whiplash in Dominick. He relished hearing the gossip about Morgan but recoiled at talk about his daughter. He had always loved murder stories. Now he was torn. But how could he not be fascinated by what people said about the Morgan case? Rona Jaffe speculated that someone near the Reagans might have killed Vicki Morgan because she knew all the secrets. Frederick Combs told him that Morgan’s confessed killer, Marvin Pancoast, had been in AA for four years. Then Lenny phoned again to give him even more news regarding the Morgan murder. There were sex tapes.
Dominick repeated the Morgan gossip about the sex tapes to his brother and sister-in-law when he met them for lunch at Boh!, a restaurant in Santa Monica. John and Joan listened, but they were much more interested in discussing the upcoming Sweeney trial. They asked if a plea bargain had been offered by the defense team; they said it would be a way of avoiding a trial that might be unpleasant for the family. Dominick told them no, there had been no plea bargain. The three of them ate their lunch and parted on good terms.
He did not think much about the conversation until, two days later, a friend of his brother phoned. Barry Farrell had worked with John at Time magazine in the 1960s, and after introducing himself, the journalist said he had a message from Sweeney’s lawyer, Marvin Adelson: they wanted a plea bargain, and Sweeney would be willing to go to prison for fifteen years. Farrell went on to say how Adelson saw the case as that of “a blue-collar kid who got mixed up in Beverly Hills society and couldn’t handle it.” Dominick knew what Adelson meant and was offended. The case would be tried “not as a crime, but as a tragedy.”
The following day, John made separate phone calls to Lenny and Dominick, asking each of them to accept the plea bargain. He said he had spoken to a lawyer friend, Leslie Abramson, who told him it was not unusual for a plea bargain to be presented to the victim’s family through an intermediary. Abramson herself had been approached by Adelson to perform that very duty some time ago but refused because she knew Joan and John personally. Dominick resented John’s back-to-back phone calls with him and Lenny to discuss the plea bargain.
And there were worse things than phone calls being made. “We got reports that Joan and John were going to Ma Maison,” said Alex Dunne. “In Los Angeles at that time, there were two restaurants that were the power places to be seen. One was Chasen’s. The other was Ma Maison. And we got reports that Joan and John continued to dine at Ma Maison. Being seen there was what they cared about.” What made their appearance even more galling was that many people in the entertainment business began to boycott Ma Maison to show their support of Dominick’s family. In fact, the restaurant’s reputation never fully recovered.
The phone calls regarding the plea bargain took place over a weekend, and neither Lenny nor Dominick had the prosecuting attorney’s home phone number to discuss the issue with him. Early Monday, they phoned Steven Barshop’s office to ask about a proposed plea bargain. He was furious that there had been any such talk. Besides, it was out of the Dunne family’s hands, he told them. The state had taken the case to court. But what really infuriated Barshop went beyond mere talk: John and Joan had written him a letter, telling him how to try the case.
Dominick now told people he “loathed” his brother. John and Joan’s secretary revealed that the couple refused to have the trial even mentioned in their home, despite their attempts to influence it. And like Alex, Dominick kept hearing that the Didions dined regularly at Ma Maison. Then he got word that John and Joan would soon be leaving for Europe with their daughter, Quintana, and would not be back until after Labor Day, at which time the trial would be over. According to friends, Joan and John had another fear beyond their dead niece’s reputation being attacked in court. They worried that Quintana, a friend of Dominique, would be called to testify, and they did not want to put their daughter through such an ordeal. John called Dominique his daughter’s “surrogate sister.”
“Joan and John felt Quintana would be compelled to say certain things that might be used against Dominique,” said their friend Susanna Moore. “They were very clear they didn’t want her to testify. Nick felt they had abandoned him, that they were negligent and not caring, which wasn’t the truth.”
Joan and John’s fear about their daughter being called to testify, however, was an empty one. “I don’t think there ever was an issue that Quintana would testify,” said Steven Barshop. “It would have been judged inadmissible.”
With the trial only a week away, Dominick distracted himself by indulging in his two favorite pursuits, gossip and star-watching. He remained connected enough in the Hollywood community to hear news no one ever got on TV or in the newspapers. He heard that agent Freddie Fields was busted for possession of cocaine coming back from the Cannes Film Festival; Ronald Reagan would not run for a second term because he was going deaf and could no longer hide the problem; and Marvin Pancoast had not killed Vicki Morgan but took the fall. In other words, Allan Carr’s erstwhile secretary would be released from a mental institution in a few years and be a million dollars richer. The case fascinated Dominick. Many amateur sleuths speculated that a killer who confesses the crime to the police would not have rubbed his fingerprints off the baseball bat; he would have been blood-splattered; and the drawers would not have been rifled through since he, Pancoast, roomed with Morgan.
While pages of Mrs. Grenville went unwritten, Dominick produced reams for his Vanity Fair article once the pretrial began. It appalled him that testimony given by Lenny and one of Sweeney’s ex-girlfriends, Lillian Pierce, would not be heard by the jury. Before her murder, Dominique had been beaten by Sweeney and escaped to her mother’s house. Judge Burton S. Katz ruled that such evidence was inadmissible on the grounds it was hearsay.
Two years before Dominique’s murder, Pierce had been beaten repeatedly by Sweeney, causing her to be hospitalized twice. During that testimony, it startled Dominick to hear how defense attorney Marvin Adelson framed his question: “Let me re
mind you, Miss Pierce, when you met with Mr. Joe Shapiro and me for lunch on November third, you said . . .”
Dominick wondered why Adelson and Shapiro met with Pierce the day before Dominique’s actual death. As he explained the situation, “efforts were being made to free her killer by men who knew very well this was not his first display of violence.”
In the pretrial, Pierce spoke of Sweeney’s violent treatment of her, and during that damaging testimony the accused lost it. He exploded and grew so enraged at what his ex-girlfriend said on the stand that he ran for the rear door of the courtroom. The bailiff grabbed the defendant and four guards wrestled him to the floor after being alerted by a secret alarm system.
Despite Sweeney’s mad display, Judge Katz ruled that “the prejudicial effect outweighed the probative value” with regard to Pierce’s testimony. The judge’s ruling meant that her damning words would never be heard by the jury. Dominick worried, “Nearly everything Adelson requested was being granted.”
He was not being paranoid. “Based on the rulings I got, almost everything was inadmissible. The case went south,” Steven Barshop said years later. “The judge and I became mortal enemies, and still are. His rulings were terrible.”
Dominick anguished over the fact that the jury would never see the jealous animal that lost it in court. By the time the jury appeared there, Sweeney miraculously turned himself into a Bible-toting martyr and even dressed in black to resemble a priest. Dominick told Lenny he reminded him of the religious fanatic that Robert Mitchum played in The Night of the Hunter. Left out of that portrayal, as well as his reporting for Vanity Fair, was that Sweeney, attempting suicide, slashed his wrists while in prison.
Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 17
