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

by Robert Hofler

Mike Tipping covered the trial for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook and wrote about Sweeney’s rampage in court. As soon as his article appeared in the newspaper, Judge Katz reprimanded the reporter for sensationalizing the outburst. Tipping tried to talk to the Dunne family. He knelt in front of Lenny in her wheelchair. “It was small talk. They all looked like they hated being approached,” the reporter recalled. “They were royally pissed off.”

  In the beginning, Dominick found Steven Barshop to be brilliant. Especially effective was the dramatic moment in court when the prosecutor told the jury that it took the 170-pound Sweeney four to six minutes to strangle the 112-pound Dominique Dunne. Barshop then asked for complete silence in the courtroom and, looking at his wrist watch, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to show you how long it took for Dominique Dunne to die.” Sitting there for those four grueling minutes, Dominick believed any juror would have to find Sweeney guilty of premeditated murder.

  Dominick wrote about it in harrowing detail in his notes for the Vanity Fair article. What he did not include in the final article was a moment in court that proved equally anguishing for him—but for an entirely different reason.

  In mid-August, Dominick’s boyfriend took the stand. A few weeks before Dominique’s murder, Norman Carby took photographs of his actress-friend. It was no ordinary photo session. She came to him late one night after being badly beaten by Sweeney. During the fight, her boyfriend had taken one of the Regency bamboo chairs that Dominick used in his Christmas card portraits and thrown it at Dominique. Sweeney threw the antique chair so hard that he reduced it to bamboo splinters. Carby, taking photographs to document her bruises, tried to buoy Dominique’s spirit. He joked, “You won’t need any makeup for tomorrow’s shoot.” She laughed, briefly, because it was true. The following day, Dominique played a battered victim on an episode of Hill Street Blues.

  Now, almost a year later, Carby sat on the stand testifying about those photographs. Showing them to the jury, Marvin Adelson made a big deal about the one photo in which Dominique was shown laughing. If she had just been beaten by her boyfriend, why was she laughing, Adelson wanted to know? Carby explained the situation, how he had tried to make a joke, but Adelson dismissed that explanation.

  Dominick grew nervous the more he watched and listened to his boyfriend testify. He felt that Carby came off very gay on the stand and worried that it would influence the jurors. When Adelson asked Carby how he knew Dominique, Carby answered that she was a friend whom he had known for many years. The attorney then asked about Carby’s friendship with Dominique’s father.

  Dominick panicked. He reached into his jacket pocket for his daughter’s Annie Hall glasses, the same ones he brought to court every day. Carby did not immediately answer Adelson’s question. He paused. Suddenly, Judge Katz brought the questioning to a halt. He asked both lawyers to approach the bench. Dominick could only think about his relationship with Carby, kept secret from all but a few friends. Now it would be exposed to Lenny, his two sons, and the world beyond. Only Mike Tipping of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook covered the trial on a daily basis. But this bombshell could not be ignored. Now every news outlet would be eager to follow the trial.

  Finally, the whispering between the judge and the two lawyers ended. When the questioning resumed, Adelson dropped any further reference to Carby’s relationship with the Dunne family. Dominick could breathe again. He opened his eyes. He put his daughter’s sunglasses back into the pocket of his jacket. The trial continued.

  Interviewed years later, Adelson said he did not recall his line of questioning that day with Norman Carby. He denied, however, that he tried in any way to out Dominick Dunne. “That would be not only evil but foolish,” he said. Carby also did not recall the exchange.

  Dominick, always hypersensitive about his sexual orientation, may have exaggerated the moment. In his journal, he wrote of it being “a miracle” that his reputation had been spared.

  What John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion feared, however, did happen. When John Sweeney took the stand, he trashed Dominique’s reputation, making unsubstantiated charges. When Alex Dunne began to weep, Adelson brought it to the court’s attention. “Your honor, Alex Dunne has tears in his eyes,” he said and asked that Dominique’s brother be told to leave the courtroom.

  Alex Dunne did not need to be ordered. He told his father, “I can’t go back anymore. I can’t be there where Sweeney is,” and never returned to the courtroom.

  In his article “Justice,” Dominick did not repeat the exact details Sweeney gave to justify his beating Dominique. “His violent past remained sacrosanct and inviolate, but her name was allowed to be trampled upon and kicked, with unsubstantiated charges, by the man who killed her,” he wrote. It marked the beginning of his victims’ rights crusade.

  The Associated Press had not been covering the trial, but their reporter Linda Deutsch made a special one-day visit for Sweeney’s testimony. Deutsch had been covering murder cases for years, starting with the Charles Manson trial, and in the following years would become one of Dominick’s closest colleagues among the courtroom press corps. They never discussed her one-day visit to cover the Sweeney trial, and she doubted that Dominick was aware she ever attended it. On the subject of victims’ rights, Deutsch opined, “If you don’t want your reputation dragged through the mud, don’t get murdered.” Regarding the Sweeney trial, she recalled finding the defendant “very pathetic. There was no question he loved Dominique to distraction and he killed her out of love. He was insane, very disturbing.”

  The lowest blow to the prosecution came when Judge Katz found that Sweeney committed the murder without premeditation despite the four to six minutes he had his hands wrapped around Dominique’s throat. The judge’s decision took out of consideration the charge of first-degree murder, leaving the jury to decide between second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter. Although a courtroom novice, Dominick knew what that meant. If there was a split decision with the jury, they would go with the lesser charge, if for no other reason than to settle the matter and be done with it.

  The jury deliberated for eight days, and in the end, as Dominick feared, the jurors leveled the lesser charge, voluntary manslaughter. As one juror explained it to a TV reporter, “A few jurors were just hot and tired and wanted to give up.”

  Outraged, Dominick could not accept the decision of voluntary manslaughter. He had to do something, say something. When Judge Katz thanked the jurors, he thanked them on behalf of the court, the attorneys, and the two families.

  “Not for our family, Judge Katz!” Dominick yelled out in the courtroom.

  Stunned, Katz said, “You will have your chance to speak at the time of the sentencing, Mr. Dunne.”

  “It’s too late then!”

  “I will have to ask the bailiff to remove you from the courtroom.”

  “No, I’m leaving the courtroom. It’s all over here.” With those words, Dominick began to wheel Lenny from the courtroom. Before he got to the hallway, he turned back to confront the judge one last time. “You have withheld important evidence from this jury about this man’s history of violence against women!” he shouted.

  Griffin Dunne called it his family’s “proudest moment.”

  The court sentenced Sweeney to six and a half years in prison. Because of the time he had already spent in jail and probation, he would be free in only two and a half years.

  Was Dominick’s outburst in any way planned? Was he playing editor and giving his article the dramatic conclusion that the readers of Vanity Fair would expect?

  Steven Barshop knew Dominick was writing an article on the trial for the magazine. Marvin Adelson did not. Both attorneys, however, believed Dominick’s outburst to be genuine and not in any way planned or calculated. “He was obviously very upset,” said Adelson.

  In one important respect, the prosecutor found Lenny and Dominick typical of other parents caught in their impossible situation. “I’ve done cases where the guy is convicted,” sai
d Barshop. “And the parent looks at me: ‘It doesn’t make any difference. I want my child back.’”

  Regarding the Sweeney trial, Barshop found the mother of the victim more than understanding. She even invited the attorney and his wife to dinner, Dominick not being present that evening. “I loved Ellen Griffin Dunne,” said Barshop. “She was a very classy lady.” His feelings about Dominick were more complicated. “I found him demanding, very self-absorbed, someone who wanted answers. Could he be vindictive? Absolutely,” he said. “What goes on in the jury system and the justice system is not something lay people understand. The things that happen as they happen in a case are things that are generally out of my control, except for the presentation of evidence.”

  Dominick withheld his opinion of Barshop in the “Justice” article, but many years later he said he “hated” the prosecutor.

  Dominick and Lenny may have been devastated by what happened in court, but unlike most parents who endured such a tragedy, they both took action. She founded a group called Justice for Homicide Victims. “It was one of the first victims’ rights groups that’s activist-oriented,” said Alex Dunne. “Before that there were groups where you basically sat around and cried. This group was, ‘Let’s do something about it.’”

  After the trial, Lenny took to the phone to cold-call hundreds of other parents of murdered children. She told them, “You don’t know me, but we have something terrible in common. I lost my daughter the same way you lost yours.” One of those parents she phoned was Marcella Leach, whose daughter Marsy had been murdered. Through the work of Leach and Justice for Homicide Victims, Marsy’s Law, or the California Victims Right Law of 2008, was enacted.

  Dominick also took action. When John Sweeney was released from jail two and a half years later, a friend ran into Dominick at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Nick was ready to kill Sweeney,” she said. He even went so far as to meet with Anthony Pellicano. According to Dominick, the private detective dissuaded him from ordering a hit on Sweeney. “You don’t want to do that,” Pellicano warned.

  “I really didn’t want to do it,” Dominick recalled, “and I wasn’t asking him to do it. I was there to see if he knew someone who could do it.” Later, he did hire Pellicano to follow Sweeney, to see if he was dating other women. “My rage needed a release from the persistent plan in my mind to hire someone to kill him, an obsession I had for months,” he said. “I decided I didn’t want to live in a state of revenge.”

  In a way, Dominick had already started on another path by the time Sweeney left prison in 1985. Wracked by guilt for not having done more to protect his daughter from her ex-boyfriend, Dominick became a crusader—and not only through what he wrote. “He often went to Parents of Murdered Children meetings like a parish priest, talking to parents of other murdered children,” said Marie Brenner. “I had a cousin whose child was murdered, and Dominick became obsessed with helping me with that case.”

  Years later, Brenner wrote the New Yorker article “Murder on the Border,” about the homicide of an eighteen-year-old. “Dominick gave me the playbook for what to do and how to do it,” she said. “His passion didn’t just infuse all his writing; it was much more than a pastime. He spent from 1983 up through the 1990s going to fund-raisers and dinners, making speeches and phone calls.”

  To the general public, it was Dominick’s writing that spoke most vividly of his commitment. The travesty of justice delivered by Judge Burton S. Katz gave focus to everything he wrote, and that miscarriage of justice would take center stage in all the novels he wrote after The Winners.

  But first came the private journal that he wrote during the trial and the Vanity Fair article it spawned. “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer” did not fit perfectly into Dominick’s premise that money buys justice, a premise he would expand and deepen over the years. In the John Sweeney trial, the defendant was not wealthy and it was his victim who came from money, her mother being a rich heiress. Dominick weighted the circumstances by turning Patrick Terrail, owner of Ma Maison, into the object of his hatred for allegedly helping Sweeney with his defense. In Dominick’s reporting, the Ma Maison habitué Joe Shapiro became not only omnipresent but the power behind the public defender, especially with regard to the meeting between himself, Marvin Adelson, and Lillian Pierce the day before doctors took Dominique off life support.

  “Justice,” however, did break journalistic ground. Dominick filled it with the kind of personal, often ghastly observations that heretofore were not a part of court reporting. Just as he gave reporters covering the David Begelman scandal interesting details about Ray Stark and other movie moguls, Dominick knew how to color his coverage of the Sweeney trial to give it drama. He reported on how the defense attorney brought his children to court and lovingly taunted them, “Now don’t you talk,” as if to make himself beloved by the jury. He also wrote how a People magazine photographer had been summoned to Judge Katz’s private chamber, expecting to be admonished for something he did in court. Instead, the judge wanted to know which of his eyeglasses photographed better. Dominick also revealed how it fell to Joe Shapiro to tell Sweeney’s mother that her son did not want to see her even though she had endured a two-day bus trip to get to the Santa Monica courthouse. And “Justice” marked the first time Dominick described in print what he despised most about a man: his toupee. Dominick wrote that Adelson wore “a quarter pound of hair taped to his head.” For Dominick, it never got worse than a rug on a man’s head.

  In other words, the article delivered. It was the kind of sensational material Tina Brown needed to successfully relaunch Vanity Fair.

  “Dominick had a voice that was so personal, that spoke to you right off the page,” said Brown. “He buttonholes you. It was the instantaneous arrival and debut of a writer. . . . Vanity Fair had found its first voice. . . . He became our first star writer. I believe the defining voice of the magazine.”

  For years to come, the rumor in the halls of Vanity Fair was that Dominick’s article came to editor Wayne Lawson in the form of “scraps of paper,” according to more than one source who worked for the magazine. It was a tale embellished by Lawson’s own estimation, told to people, that Dominick’s prose required extremely heavy editing. There was also Lawson’s reputation as a very hands-on editor even before his tenure at Vanity Fair. In his long career in journalism, Lawson wrote very few articles under his own byline. He was well known, however, as a ghostwriter. He had “written” Gloria Swanson’s autobiography and “edited” two novels by Jerzy Kosinski, a writer infamous for employing coauthors to radically rework his prose without giving them coauthor credit. If Dominick did in fact turn in scraps of paper to Lawson, they were pretty good scraps of writing: much of the article is verbatim from Dominick’s type-written journal, completed before he delivered any copy to Vanity Fair.

  7

  Bloomingdales and Videotapes

  While awaiting publication of Mrs. Grenville, Dominick continued to follow the Vicki Morgan murder case with the rapt interest of an idle novelist in search of a terrific new story to tell. He learned that Allan Carr’s ex-secretary Marvin Pancoast also confessed to the Sharon Tate murders and other crimes he could not possibly have committed. Dominick preferred writing about the wealthy upper-crust society on the East Coast, but Hollywood and its rich had their undeniable, tacky appeal. He heard about the latest status symbol for the citizens of Beverly Hills: they parked a police car in their driveway to ward off criminals. He heard stories that Aaron Spelling’s driveway sported one, and as a gift the TV producer gave a patrol car to the Ray Starks. Dominick’s reinvigorated hatred of L.A. would only fuel him to complete such a new novel about murder in such a “threatening” place.

  After writing his “Justice” article, Dominick had to slog through a couple of celebrity fluff pieces for Vanity Fair, ranging from “Blonde Ambition,” about such up-and-coming starlets as Daryl Hannah and Kim Basinger, to “Candy’s Dynasty,” about Aaron Spelling’s eccen
tric wife. Finally, he got to cover another murder trial.

  The accused killer Marvin Pancoast was not rich or famous, but his victim, Vicki Morgan, was infamous, and her mistress ties to Alfred S. Bloomingdale took the case to the highest echelons of wealth and power in America. One year into his presidency, Ronald Reagan appointed Bloomingdale to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. It was not lost on Dominick that the scandal involved two power couples he had invited to his Black and White Ball in 1964. He never got over the Bloomingdales, the Reagans, and their circle of friends dumping him in the 1970s. More likely they forgot him. Dominick, eager to make them remember, flew to Los Angeles in late spring 1984 to cover the trial for Vanity Fair.

  “Dominick wasn’t at the trial long,” said lead defense attorney Arthur Barens. “He was in the courtroom for the Bloomingdale matter with the tapes.”

  The tapes were the sex tapes that reportedly showed Vicki Morgan cavorting with not only Bloomingdale but other men in President Reagan’s social and political set.

  Only there were no videotapes. Or no videotapes that anyone ever found, despite rumors they would be introduced as evidence in the trial. Without the tapes and without any interviews from Betsy Bloomingdale, Nancy Reagan, or anybody in their exalted social set, Dominick’s article “The Woman Who Knew Too Little” for Vanity Fair was an inauspicious follow-up to “Justice,” but not a total loss.

  Covering the trial provided Dominick with research for another novel, and it led him to a memoir without which he could not have written what would ultimately be his fourth novel. Or, at least, if he had written An Inconvenient Woman without first reading Alfred’s Mistress, his book would have been a far different, perhaps less convincing, roman à clef about a wealthy, politically connected woman who orders a hit on her dead husband’s destitute mistress.

  Alfred’s Mistress is Vicki Morgan’s memoir as ghostwritten by a screenwriter named Gordon Basichis. While she was alive, Morgan and Basichis did not get much writing done but they did become lovers, despite his being married with an eighteen-month-old son. Basichis recorded his conversations with Morgan, and after eight months of collaboration on the book and exactly one week before her murder, she fired him from the project and broke off their affair, although not necessarily in that order. Despite the split, they continued to fight. Then they made up and spent the night together, which happened to be the penultimate night of her life.